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Columnist: Kathleen Meadows

Image credit: sxc.hu

The fortune cookie

Synchronicity is a term coined by the famous psychiatrist, Carl Jung which has made its way into common usage. He used it to label our experience of two unconnected events which happen simultaneously that feel perceptually related. For example, bumping into someone you dreamt about the night before, or seeing the same numbers over and over in different places such as digital clocks, licence plates, and prices. These two events feel related and trigger us to ponder their meaning. We just know it means something profound but for the life of us we can’t figure out what!

I had my first experience with synchronicity as a child, probably like most people. I would have dreams that I would later experience in remarkable detail in my waking life. At first this scared me half to death since many of my dreams were nightmares. I couldn’t figure out what would set this process into motion because there didn’t seem to be anything I was doing to cause it to happen, nor were the dreams particularly remarkable at all. I might, for example, turn around to put a towel back on the rack and suddenly I was inside a dream I’d had weeks earlier. I distinctly remembered having the dream and I could predict exactly what would happen next.

Once I got a few of these oddball synchronicities under my belt, I tried to make it happen. I started loving the feeling! It was exciting, mysterious and somehow uplifting. Riding my bicycle really fast down a hill, closing my eyes as tight as I could, or climbing into a freezing bath however, didn’t seem to do the trick. That good old synchronicity experience persistently adhered to random and nonsense. By the time I was a teenager I started noticing synchronicity in other circumstances.

Separating synchronicity from psychic ability however was my adolescent challenge. I knew I was psychic too so thinking of someone and bumping into them was more about connecting with them psychically than synchronicity. Synchronicity was different. It was more about connecting to something else – something rather grand and outside the realm of just us. I would wonder who was orchestrating this synchronicity. What did it mean in general and specific terms?

I’ve a couple of real dandies like most people. Synchronicities that blew my mind – which I will remember as long as I live and probably long after besides. As a psychic reader of course I come across oddities that some might describe as synchronicity but I would classify more under the heading of psychic. One woman made an appointment to meet with me under quite extraordinary circumstances…she had seen a reader months earlier while visiting a friend in London England. The reader told her she must see a reader that is practicing close to her home in Canada in a tea room and her name is Kathleen. The story gets stranger. Upon returning home she went looking for a reader named Kathleen who was doing readings in a local tea room and found me. She was shocked to discover I was working out of a tea room she frequented with her girlfriends and had never heard of me! She found me actually on the internet by keying in words like “tarot reader Kitchener tea room.

Another client’s email program resent an email months after the first time it was sent and also popped up an online astrological chart she had found on the net at the same time months before. She promptly made an appointment to have another reading on this same issue in the event some things had changed since her first reading and indeed they had!

Perhaps the most extraordinary experience I’ve had with synchronicity happened while I was living in San Francisco in 1989 studying for my M.A. in east/west psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I had decided that spring that the course I was taking with Angeles Arrien on Transitions which focused on the teachings of the I-Ching, was to be my last. At the end of the course I planned to return home to Canada. I was feeling rather wistful after that first class of the course and headed to a Hunan Restaurant on the Haight to have some soup and contemplate my circumstances. After my meal, the waiter brought the bill with a fortune cookie. I opened the cookie to read the message with my usual curious-but-not-expecting-anything-profound frame of mind, and it read, “You need a new environment. Try Canada.” I squawked and leaped to my feet before I could have a second thought. All the hairs on my body stood on end. The waiter rushed over to see if everything was okay. I said, “This fortune cookie! It’s impossible!” I noticed everyone in the restaurant was gawking at me and embarrassed I quickly paid my bill and walked all the way home. I hardly noticed the 5 km.

I just couldn’t get my head around this fortune cookie! It was such a perfect answer to what was troubling me. I felt such joy that I was making the right decision to leave San Francisco – and all because a fortune cookie told me so. The fact that the waiter had just casually reached into a box of fortune cookies and pulled just that one out for me was simply beyond anything I could comprehend.

A realization I had while walking home was that synchronicity was like dreaming. If we don’t pick up a dream message on its first run we will have the dream again, and again until we do. I had an insight that synchronicity must be subjected to the same dynamic. I really thought I must have missed a few signals before this incident with the fortune cookie to push the universe to resort to such an extreme measure. Upon returning home to Canada I watched the news like a freak expecting something disastrous to happen in San Francisco and indeed there was a destructive earthquake in October of that year that would have impacted on me. Most importantly however, I met my husband just a short month after my return which I felt was the true reason for a need for me to return to Canada right at that time!

David Wilcock in his fascinating book titled, The Synchronicity Key posits that synchronicity is a sacred process to remind us that we are all connected, that we are all ONE. It’s a signal that wakes us up to this sacred reality of unity and connectedness. I know it has rattled me awake many times in my life and I am always thankful when it happens. It’s exciting, regenerating and warming to our hearts and minds.

If you are interested in the esoteric sciences and psychic ability development you will find the articles on my web site an interesting read. Visit my web site Exploring the Psychic Experience.

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